Aspects of the invention can relate to a system, a program, and a method for generating a layout rule. In particular, the invention can relate to a system for generating a layout rule, a layout system, a grogram for generating a layout rule, a layout program, a storage medium, a method of generating a layout rule, and a layout method, which are suitable for reflecting the layout of an existing document to the result of automatic layout.
Related art techniques of automatic layout to provide a document-image region splitting method is disclosed are disclosed in, for example JP-A-62-86465, and a document-logic-structure recognition system is disclosed in, for example JP-A-5-159101.
The invention described in JP-A-62-86465 includes the step of extracting a rectangle that circumscribes each connected component in a document image including a character region and a figure or photograph region, the step of determining a mean size of a character-circumscribing rectangle constructing a vertical or lateral character string from the adjacency relationship of the circumscribing rectangles, and the step of discriminating the character region from the figure or photograph region other than the character region, with reference to the mean size.
In the invention described in JP-A-5-159101, a document image inputted by an input section is split into multiple elements by a document-image splitting section. A matching processing section investigates to which of structure models defined in a structure-model management section the relationship between the elements in the inputted document image matches to determine to which of the logic-structure elements in the structure models each element corresponds. A contents recognition section performs contents recognition with the attributes of the logic-structure elements of the corresponding structure model recognized by the matching processing section as parameters.